Cult of Mac

Last week we reported on an issue plaguing owners of the 3G iPad 2 hooked up to the Verizon network. A growing number of users have reported a problem with their device that means they have to reboot their iPad to reactivate their 3G data connection. On Friday, Apple issued an official statement to All Things Digital, acknowledging the problem and reassuring users that they are investigating the issue:

We are aware that a small number of iPad 2 customers have experienced connectivity issues with the Verizon 3G network and we are investigating it.

A thread on the Apple Support Discussions forum now spans 9 pages long and is full of reports from disgruntled Verizon customers who are having problems with their iPad 2. The issues begins when 3G is turned off from within the settings app. When it’s turned back on, the data connection does not restore, simply displaying a “Searching…” message where the carrier’s name should be.

The only fix at the moment is to reboot the device while 3G is set to ‘on’ – this restores the data connection upon reboot. It’s likely a fix for this problem will come in a minor iOS software update shortly.

[via InfoWorld]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTuniZZA1VY

A new iPhone application called Friends Aloud from VoiZapp uses state of the art text-to-speech technology to read aloud your Facebook news feed. It cycles through your friends’ status updates, as well as the associated comments, and reads them out in a pleasant, easy to understand voice.

For Facebook addicts Friends Aloud allows you to peel your eyes away from your iPhone or computer screen but remain up to date. Leave your device in your bag, pocket, or on your desk, and carry on with your day while you listen to everything that’s happening on Facebook.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Offering that imitation as a parody allows commentary while avoiding the Wrath of Legal. Spoofs of Apple commercials are certainly not a new phenomenon, but recently we’ve moved past Get A Mac and Dancing Silhouettes into the Jony Ive Era: soft music, featherlight products and dark T-shirts.

The world’s creative types have noticed, producing a stream of variations on Apple’s ubiquitous advertising. SlateV uses Ive himself to introduce one of Apple’s greatest technological wonders, the iPhone 4 Bumper.

The hiring of a Senior Composites Engineer at Apple has fuelled more speculation that the company could move away from aluminum for building future devices, choosing to use carbon fiber instead. Kevin Kenny began work at the Cupertino campus this month after spending 14 years building carbon fiber bicycles for Kestral Bicycles, where he was the President and CEO.

This isn’t the first time Kenny has worked with Apple; a patent called “Reinforced Device Housing” filed by the company in 2009 had Kenny’s name on it, and depicted an outer casing for electronic devices made from ultra-strong carbon fiber. The patent reveals Kenny was clearly working with Apple for a long time before he became a full-time employee.

The iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have already made Apple a huge player when it comes to gaming, with the touchscreen devices proving to be stiff competition for handheld consoles such as the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. However, two faces headed to the Apple camp would suggest the Cupertino company wants to get even more serious about gaming.

Simon & Schuster announced on Sunday that the authorized biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been scheduled for an early 2012 release. The book entitled iSteve: The Book of Jobs is being written by Walter Isaacson, who has been working on the biography since 2009 and has enjoyed rare and exclusive interviews with Jobs, members of his family, and his colleagues at Apple.

As a parent, it is always important to keep tabs on what your children are doing on the computer. Whether it’s the sites they are visiting, the amount of time they spend online, or even what applications they are using, Mac OS X can cover it. OS X includes a set of parental controls that can be tweaked to anyone’s liking. In this video, you will see how to set up parental controls and use the features that work best for you.

When the clocks go forwards or back, people from New Zealand to New York miss their appointments because their iPhone alarm does not go off on time. Every time I complete a 10km run using my iPod nano, TIger Woods congratulates me on having completed another 500km. And as you read this, thousands of backups are failing because Time Machines are freezing in time.

What do these seemingly disparate events having in common? They’re all presumably the handiwork of Apple’s “B-team”.

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Winners:

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Still rollerskating around in your short-shorts with tunes blaring on the headphones that came with your original Walkman? Tsk tsk… Everyone knows that’s a look that won’t be hip again for at least another 5 years.

It’s no secret that the iPad 2 should open the floodgates of the augmented reality experience — and here’s another example of what the iPad 2 can do with AR.

No doubt in anticipation of Yuri’s Night, Vito Technology has just released an AR-equipped version of their venerable star-watching iPad app, Star Walk ($5). Just hold the screen up to the sky and the app will superimpose constellations and all sorts of other info onto a realtime image of the sky being viewed through the iPad 2’s camera. And that’s on top of all the other cool features, like a satellite tracker, night mode and a time-machine function that lets you see what the sky looks like on any given day or time.

Still saving for an iPad 2? That’s ok, the iPhone version has the same features (but not the awesomeness of the iPad’s giant screen), and it’s on sale for a buck till April 12 — which, not coincidentally,  is Yuri’s Night.

Just like Pogoplug and ZumoCast (the latter currently MIA from the app store), Tonido is a service that’ll let users stream media and access files on a computer from a mobile device. It sort of combines features from both — it’s completely free, works via a mobile app that connects to server software (free download from Tonido) running the user’s computer and allows access to music, videos, photos and even plain ‘ol documents. In fact, pretty much everything on a connected hard drive is accessable.

The big difference with Tonido though, is that virtually nothing is stored in a cloud — not even your account password (“think of the Tonido server like a giant router” says co-founder Venkat Ramasay). Don’t want to use your computer as the server? Tonido sells a remarkably-Pogoplug-looking NAS device for $99 that you can plug an external HDD or USB stick into. Ramasay says the software footprint is also very small, and that’s it’s also intended to run on home routers.  The next version will also support Airplay.

The interface seems a little rough around the edges — I wasn’t able to stream music because I couldn’t figure out a way to simply select music to play, for instance — but it’s free, so worth taking a look at.

We close out another week with three hardware deals. First up are nine iMacs from the Apple Store, starting at $1,019 for an i3 powered iMac running at 3.06GHz. The desktop machine also has a 22-inch screen. Next is a luxury iPad convertible flip case. The final spotlight item is a USB turntable from Numark which converts your vinyl to MP3 and then ships them to your iPod with a built-in dock.

Along the way, we also check out other deals on iPad cases, as well as software and accessory bargains. As always, details on these and many other products can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Earlier today, we brought you a report from CrunchGear about a Best Buy employee who had revealed that the retail giant was deliberately saving stock of the iPad 2 once it had met its sales quotas each day – a technique that apparently didn’t sit too well with Apple.

Since then, Best Buy has denied rumors that it has fallen out with the Cupertino company, and declared it was holding stock of the iPad 2 for an “upcoming promotion.”

In an official statement sent to Boy Genius Report, Best Buy said:

Best Buy continues to receive iPad 2 inventory from Apple on a regular basis. As we’ve said previously, we are fulfilling customer reservations first.

Our stores have been asked to temporarily hold non-reserved iPad 2 inventory for an upcoming promotion. This is a customary practice for us when there are supply constraints. Best Buy enjoys a great partnership with Apple, and we’re delighted by customer response to iPad 2.

While Best Buy seem to have clarified the issue of holding stock, it did not comment on a claim that its employees were lying to customers by informing them they had no stock of the second generation device, when in fact its stock rooms could be littered with them.

Selling itself as the first app to help hunters find their prey, iHunt Journal may also be on target for controversy.

iHunt Journal, approved by Apple for use by anyone over the age four because it contains no objectionable material, calls itself the “ultimate all-in-one hunting app:”

Whether your focus is on planning your next hunt based on weather and solunar periods, keeping a trophy gallery and hunting journal, or statistics and research of your past hunts, this is the application you need.

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If you’ve jailbroken your device for the first time this week (thanks to the iOS 4.3.1 untethered jailbreak being released), chances are that you may not know where to begin. There are thousands of neat things that you can do once jailbroken.

This post will cover just 6 of them, all of which I personally consider “must-have” tweaks for anybody who has recently joined the jailbreak scene.

This weekend sees the final of the 2011 Masters Golf Tournament, and as a way of celebrating, EA has reduced some of its most popular iPhone and iPod touch games by up to 67%. Of course, the brand new Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 is the one you’ll want most during the Masters commercial breaks.

There are 10 great games featured in the sale, including Dead Space, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, The Sims 3, and The Simpsons Arcade. Check out the full list after the break!

You may have read Thursday a report Apple has purchased equipment to store 12 petabytes (around 12,000 terabytes) of data, prompting some to suggest the deal targets the Cupertino, Calif. company’s expected cloud-based services. Friday, one Wall Street analyst said such huge amounts of data “dovetail nicely” with a ‘Cloud Tunes,’ an online version of Apple’s popular iTunes.

“We believe that Apple will release a new cloud strategy by the fall, likely integrating its MobileMe services and taking advantage of its significant investments in its North Carolina data center,” writes Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital.

It’s been shown that tots take to iPads like ducks to water. One school district in Maine will hand them out to 5-year-olds in the hopes of boosting reading skills.

An iPad pilot program in Auburn, Maine will put them in the hands of kids in certain classrooms in May and all six elementary schools in the district next fall.

Officials hope to improve literacy rates from 62 percent to 90 percent in two years with the iPad scheme. The school committee recently approved spending of about $200,000 for 285 iPads for both students and teachers.

There are plenty of photo apps that do pixellation effects, but Pixel Face grabbed my attention because of the way it embraces the whole 8-bit world of pixels.

It’s not just the photos that look colorful and retro, it’s the app itself. The buttons are cheerfully bright, the sounds are like something your games console used to do back in the 1980s.

Here’s a shocker: Apple is playing its cards close to the vest about a product launch. That’s the opinion of one analyst who tells investors Friday he is “suspicious” of all the talk the Cupertino, Calif. company may delay the iPhone 5 until later this year.

“We are increasingly becoming suspicious around continued reports of a delayed iPhone 5 launch into September/October versus the typical June/July time frame,” writes Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities. Why the suspicion?

ChuChu Rocket! is packed with over 500 puzzles and frantic 4 player multiplayer action, and the Sega Dreamcast classic, which has proven to be a massive iOS hit in the App Store, has gone completely free for one day only.

10 years ago, a cute group of ChuChu’s invaded the hearts and minds of gamers as they looked for an escape plane away from the evil KapuKapus into their cozy rocket ships. now, you get to re-live the glory days of frantic puzzle fun on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad!

ChuChu Rocket! features four different difficulty levels to maximise its replay value; in addition to a free-for-all and team battle multiplayer mode with support for up to 4 players. Battle it out over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi across 25 intense multiplayer levels.

As one of the most popular puzzle games in the App Store, ChuChu Rocket! is a surefire way to cure your weekend boredom. Grab it now while it’s free!

Motorola’s Xoom is fast becoming a retailing slug. The slowness to catch-on with consumers (the Xoom sold only a fifth as many units during its first week compared to Apple) may not be totally the fault of the Android-based tablet, but partly retailers. A Friday report suggests big box tech giants and others are lumping the Xoom into the me-too iPad alternative category.

Best Buy, for instance, tells consumers they offer tablets, showing an iPad, then a Xoom under the generic “Tablet” label. At some Verizon Wireless stores, the iPad and iPad 2 are highlighted, with Samsung the obvious alternative. Meanwhile, the $599 Xoom is beside the $199 Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Now that the Verizon iPad is here, the once mythical device has turned out to be just as much of a slab of aluminum and glass as every other iPad out there… and just as prone to its own small but annoying problems.

The latest? A growing nunber of Verizon iPad 2 owners are reporting issues with the CDMA 3G modem… namely, that after turning 3G off, Verizon iPad owners need to reboot their tablets to get a connection again.

This overarticulated mech claw? It’s an iPhone stand, meant to grip your fragile handset with T-800-style menace. And it costs only slightly less than the original T-800 hand, locked somewhere in a vault deep within the belly of Cyberdyne Systems.

Called the Rokform Rokstand, the stand is machined from aluminum with an anodized finish and features six angles of adjustment boasting “precision high speed bearing and cam adjustment.”

Of course, a 50 cent business card holder will prop up your iPhone equally well, so these are just marketing phrases to distract you from the price of $169. Of course, now that you’ve heard that price, with your eyes just dangling from your sockets like that and the taste of vomit in your mouth… how much more distracted could you be?

The Rokstand comes in pink and chocolate brown too, if that makes things better.

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, tend to be deviously complex, and Valve Software‘s latest is now exception: they are sending out a series of elaborate glyphs embedded in images to multiple gaming sites.

The point of ARGs is to crowdsource their solving, joining in with a bunch of other fanatics to make a story out of the cryptic, and Valve is a master at this, so if you have any taste for these events, you may want to head over to the Wiki and get cracking on the clues.

The most likely explanation so far is that this ARG is to promote Valve’s much-anticipated physics and teleportation-based FPS, Portal 2, which is due out on Tuesday, April 19th and is the first Valve game to launch simultaneously on the PC and Mac.

The image above is about 8/9ths of the image puzzle that has been solved so far, and looks much like one of GlaDOS’s personality cores rom the original Portal.